


Blood Omen: A Summary

by vailkagami



Series: Completely Accurate Legacy of Kain Summaries [1]
Category: Legacy of Kain
Genre: Gen, I amuse myself even if I amuse no one else, Not a fanfic, in case the title was not giving it away, rated for language I guess, there are no non-shitty people in Nosgoth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-06
Updated: 2020-01-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:27:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22149415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vailkagami/pseuds/vailkagami
Summary: This is a totally accurate and absolutely academically valuable summary of a PS1 game from the 90s about an asshole vampire with questionable decision making abilities.
Series: Completely Accurate Legacy of Kain Summaries [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1698742
Kudos: 5





	Blood Omen: A Summary

**Author's Note:**

> It has been approximetely [several] years since I played Blood Omen 1, so one day, when I was very, very bored ~~at work~~ , I decided to write a summary of the game from memory, because that is a valuable and sensible use of my time.

Once upon a time in a medieval land called Nosgoth (which is possibly the entire world as there has never been any allusion to non-Nosgoth land), a man, 30 years old and of noble blood, is seeking shelter in a tavern and also booze and the conversation goes something like this:

Kain: “Give me booze, as I have traveled far and am of noble blood and also rich.”  
Tavern guy: “Naw, mate. Fuck off.”

For he stays open for no man in these dark times where things come out at night that he wouldn’t wish on anyone. Except he obviously wishes them on Kain who now is cast out on the street, cold in body and soul, and promptly gets murdered by bandits.

Upon expiring in front of an unwelcoming tavern in this shitty town called Ziegsturl (because why the fuck not), he finds himself tied up in a firey underworld, which doesn’t bother him half as much as the fact that his murderers are not tied up in a firey underworld after having expired in Ziegsturl. But as he is moping about his impotent need for vengeance, a death-faced guy named Mortanius (because why the fuck not) appears and says

“Yo, Kain, I can get you back to life so you can murder everyone.”  
And Kain, never bothering to read the fine print, is like, “Sweet.”

So he wakes up in his crypt, and his family must be loaded indeed for his mausoleum is massive in size and contains a number of rooms plain unnecessary for a dead guy, as well as some random exposition on Janos Audron, the father of the vampire race and evilest vampire ever but long dead so he won’t come up again, and a bunch of people chained to the walls begging for help from any kind sir that might come their way, which only really makes sense if his grieving loved ones had expected him to come back as a vampire in need of snack food.

Which incidentally is exactly what happened.

Kain is not happy with his transformation, nor with the fact that sunlight is now a mild inconvenience. He does, however, appreciate the not-dead bit, as well as the new strength that allows him to track down the bandits that killed him (not hard, since in all the time it must have taken to build that fucking ginormous mausoleum they never moved more than five steps from their original position) and engage in some return murder.

Once he feels the sweet relief of vengeance, sated, a familiar voice calls him to the Pillars. The pillars are kind of important, there are nine of them that go impossibly high into the sky and endlessly deep into the ground and they were first seen in the opening movie. That movie also featured vampires getting impaled on sticks, a bunch of people getting horribly killed by a green vampiry thing while calling for a guy named Malek, a guy named Malek being fashionable late to the party and then getting owned by the vampire thing and then stripped on his flesh and forever bound to his armor for sucking and being late, and then a woman getting stabbed which resulted in the pillars cracking and turning dark.

Because those pillars all are attuned to some aspect of the universe and each has a guardian that’s attuned to the pillar and they are also attuned to each other. When Ariel, guardian of Balance (aka the important one) is mysteriously murder-stabbed, her lover Nupraptor, who is incidentally the guardian of the Pillar of the mind, goes insane and thus makes all the other guardians go insane, too, and that fucks up their pillars and the land which is now plagued by war and famines and vampires and werewolves and the plague and that is why you should never hook up with your co-workers.

So now Ariel is a ghost and she meets Kain at the Pillars where he was called by Mortanius the guardian of death who also brought him back to life. As a vampire, because that’s how he rolls. Also, his name is Mortanius. Come on.

Turns out there was an ulterior motive to that, which wasn’t just Mortanius really enjoying the spectacle of people getting slaughtered by a vengeful vampire in the woods. Ariel explains that the pillars are corrupted because the circle is corrupted and in order to un-corrupt it, all the guardians have to die so new ones can be born and surprise! That’s where Kain comes in. Except she tells Kain that he is needed to save the world and Kain tells her that the world can go fuck itself for all he cares. So she points out to him that, yes, it’s saving the world, but it’s also bloody murder, which is more up his alley. In fact, she tells him:

“If you save the land you will also save yourself and become human again.”  
And Kain agrees because he never even pretended to be altruistic and feels that any offer that is not appealing to his self-interest is just wasting his time.

By matter of convenience, Ariel first sics Kain on her beloved Nurpraptor, probably because she knows where he lives and has a key to his apartment. His apartment, as it happens, is shaped like a giant skull (because of course it is) and located on the cliffs above a town called Wasserbünde (because why the fuck not) where Kain drops some racist comments about Gypsies and moves on to visit Nuprapor the Mentalist and his awesome dungeon music. Also, his dungeon. Because you gotta have one of those.

Nupraptor is also visited by Malek who really tries to not fail again and protect everyone but Nupraptor tells him to fuck off because he sucks so Malek fucks off and Nupraptor faces Kain on his own except he kind of doesn’t, because he sewed his own eyes shut (as you do) so he can’t see shit and Kain unceremoniously slaughters him. Great mental performance by the guy with the brain the size of a watermelon.

After Kain drops her lover’s skull off at the Pillars, Ariel tells him to go after Malek next, because Malek is not only the protector of the circle but he’s also the guardian of conflict and thus he needs murdering – for these reasons and many more!

To get to Malek’s bastion, Kain has to cross his old hometown of Coorhagen, which used to be the finest city of Nosgoth but is now a plague-ridden graveyard full of corpses. The most tragic thing about that is that Kain can’t drink the blood of his former neighbors without poisoning himself, and that is tragic indeed, for even in Malek’s icy bastion the situation does not improve with offers of nourishments. For Malek, mad over the punishment of discorporation bestowed upon him by Mortanuis 500 years prior (that’s mad as in insane but also mad as in pissed off) has used ancient sorceries to rip the souls of his fellow warriors of those days, the Sarafan, from their bodies and stuff them into their own armors, which means they are still around centuries after their time but also that they have no blood. Except for those two left outside the inner stronghold who have kept simply because they are frozen solid, their flesh fused to the metal of their armor, which tells us that Kain is a bad person, but Malek is a terrible boss.

As it happens, the Sarafan were an army of vampire hunters, but their empty armors fall before the power of Kain’s sword, or clubs, or whatever else he is throwing at them at any given time. Which includes a number of spells, but the worst of them strip the flesh off their victims’ bones and that is not a problem these people have anymore.

Unfortunately, Malek is still quite good at this vampire hunting game, or at driving vampires away in this case. Kain just can’t with this guy, and what he can’t is kill him. So he retreats and seeks something else to kill because by this point he’s really fucking hungry.

At this point Ariel advises him to go north and seek the advice of someone else for a change, like the oracle of Nosgoth, because of course Nosgoth has an oracle. This one lives in a cave, as oracles are wont to, and it has a museum with stuff from different time period but all of them, no matter how old, look suspiciously brand new. There’s also a tome talking about the order of the Sarafan warrior-priests that was led by Malek before the Incident and is kind of still led by him now, if only in spirit. And armor. According to the record, they were murder-bots trained to be unquestioningly loyal to the circle, living only to slaughter vampires and purify their souls. With fire. And stakes. Kain, the vampire murder-nugget, is pretty disgusted by this. But also intrigued.

Hm.

Further on, the oracle turns out to be a senile old man who reads the future in a pot of soup. The soup and the oracle tell Kain about King Ottmar the useless who should be fighting the legions of the Nemesis ravaging the land but is too mopy over the quasi-death of his daughter to do anything, and then Kain is like

“Why are you telling me this?”  
And the oracle is like “Also, find the green vampire Vorador in Termogent forest so he can murder Malek for you because you suck.”

And that, finally, is useful fucking information.

So Kain goes to Termogent Forest which is actually a swamp, which makes it a terrible place for vampires because they die horribly when wet. And probably have terrible hygiene.

Still, Vorador put his big-ass mansion smack in the middle of it, with ghost lights to lead the way for anyone trying to find his private little kingdom. Vorador is quite ready to welcome this random new vampire, but his wives/slaves/pets are not, so Kain just slaughters his way into the living room. Which Vorador is presumably okay with, as he himself likes to engage in a bit of pointless bloodshed here and there and new vampire slaves for his harem are a dime a dozen.

So Vorador talks a bunch about how Vampires are awesome and humans are cattle and basically they have the noble obligation of population control. He slurps some blood from a goblet, gives Kain some jewlery to summon him with if needed and releases him back into the swamp, and Kain is like, “Huh.”

“What just happened?  
That’s what will become of me if I stay a vampire too long so I should avoid that.  
…probably.”

Burt first he’s to take advantage of his vampire days and go find the next cluster of guardians in a place called Dark Eden, which is exactly the kind of place you would expect a place called Dark Eden to be. It’s mostly lava and monsters, but the monsters used to be normal things who got mutated by the vicinity of guardian-corruption and also science.

Inside the central dungeon (because you gotta have one of those) Kain finds no less than four pillar guardians: Bane the Druid, guardian of nature, DeJoule the Energist, guardian of Energy (duh), Anacrote the Alchemist, guardian of States (whatever the fuck that means), and Malek the untitled, guardian of failing the circle. Jackpot! So Kain summons Vorador from his earring for some settling of bills, Anacrote teleports the fuck out of there because he can, and DeJoule and Bane bugger off into the garden where they are dispatched by Kain and when Kain gets back inside Vorador has left only Malek’s now unanimated armor behind and that’s three more down. Progress!

Four to go.

Next one is Azimuth the Planer, guardian of dimensions, sitting in her HQ at Avernus Cathedral from where she is commanding an army of demons from another dimension to eat the citizens of her city and also set it on fire. Because why not.

On the way there Kain goes through the quaint, pastoral village of Uschtenheim which is said to be the birthplace of the infamous Janos Audron who snacked on the population until killed by the Sarafan, but that was 500 years ago so it’s not important anymore.

Avernus is now populated by demons and a few assholes and it’s in flames. The cathedral is not in flames, because reasons. First Kain goes up into the attic of the cathedral, though, and then down into the basement, because, well, Ariel said he should. Up at the top he finds a sword that Azimuth, as it will turn out, has been looking for for a while, but apparently not very hard, considering it’s the only thing in the top room of her own home. The sword is called Soul Reaver and its origins have been lost to history but it eats souls and Kain thinks that’s pretty awesome and feels, for the first time in perhaps ever, a hint of warmth in his cold heart as he recognizes the sword as a kindred spirit.

And the sword is like “screeeeech” as it cuts through his enemies and explodes them upon impact, which is pretty sweet.

Thus armed, Kain goes down into the basement where he find more demons, more dungeon (because you gotta have one of those) and finds some secret book about a secret cult sacrificing their first born children to some evil thing called Hash’Ak’Gik, the unspoken, which consequently is not mentioned anywhere else and doesn’t come up again, so that’s weird. And random.

Azimuth falls to the Soul Reaver pretty quickly and Kain now wants to go on and kill the remaining three circle fuckers, but he’s getting blocked by the bloody, terrible war that has been ravaging Nosgoth for a while, the invasion of the legion of the Nemesis which has been briefly mentioned before. By the oracle, complaining about King Ottmar the Lion being fucking useless. Because Ottmar the Lion is the only one who could stop the legion, but he’s not interested because his daughter is in a coma so fuck everyone else.

Turns out Ottmar’s daughter got a nice doll for her birthday, made by a goblin named Elzevir, which went something like this:

Ottmar: “You totally won the doll contest, weird goblin. As a reward you can name any wish. This reward system has never backfired on any king ever.”  
Elzevir: “All I want is a lock of your daughter’s hair, which is neither perverted nor suspicious in any way.”  
Ottmar: “Deal.”

And then the princess turned into a vegetable and obviously everyone knows that this is the Dollmaker’s fault but no one could be arsed to do anything about it. Except now Kain threatens his way into the court because the Nemesis legion is in the way of his murder spree and so he goes and dispatches the Dollmaker who seems to have been in love with the soul of the princess which he stuffed into a doll and MOVING ON.

Now that the princess is restored, Ottmar displays great leadership skills once again by immediately offering Kain his entire fucking kingdom as a reward, but Kain is like, ”Naw dude, just go and finally do something about that legion invading your land,” and they all go to war together and Kain is now a valued ally, so no one minds if he kills and eats the occasional soldier.

However, even Ottmar’s army is not enough to stop the legion, which means that all this Dollmaker business was ultimately for nothing. Thanks, Ottmar.

Ottmar falls and Kain just walks out on them and suddenly the battlefield is replaced by greenery and then he’s in the past and a random dead body nearby gives him a vision of an old guy in a hood rallying up a mob somewhere and somewhen, which requires an ability Kain doesn’t have and also this old dude is none other than the senile oracle who first rambled about Ottmar as if he were in any way important so what is going on?

Kain doesn’t waste a lot of time on what the hell is going on. He finds himself at the academic city named Stahlberg (because why the fuck not) where everyone is talking about Boy-king William the Just who is just so awesome and beloved and also taxes are down so yay! Kain soon deducts that he is about 50 years in the past for some reason, William is one day going to become the Nemesis but nowadays he’s just the Just and everyone loves him so Kain’s first brilliant idea is that he should stop the tyranny from happening through murder.

As he makes his way into the beloved king’s stronghold through the beloved king’s sewer-dungeon (because you gotta have one of those) he witnesses a conversation between the King, young in years and yet voiced by Tony Jay for reasons lost to the haze of time, and the hooded man, the oracle, the Time Streamer Moebius, guardian of the pillar of time (Reveal! Sort of.) who has been supplying William’s army with weapons lately and more specifically has given William himself the Soul Reaver to defend himself with against that vampire assassin that he also warns him about now. Before fucking off.

Left alone, William soon has to face the vampire assassin. Armed with the Soul Reaver, he puts up quite the fight, but Kain is armed with the Soul Reaver as well and also taller and stronger and a vampire. He kills William, breaking the king’s sword in the process, which is weird, because his own, older version of the same sword remains unbroken and continues to cut its way through William’s useless guards and their tasty, tasty souls.

Getting out, Kain finds another time streaming device like the one he had in his inventory until it randomly send him to the past. He goes back to the present that doesn’t smell of war anymore but instead smells of vampire blood. Turns out that Moebius used the death of the beloved boy king as a catalyst to start a genocidal crusade against the vampires, as killing vampires had gone somewhat out of fashion since the fall of the Sarafan, what with the people having had more pressing concerns like plagues, famine, insane sorcerers and the legion of the Nemesis before. Vorador and his harem had been quite content to mostly snack on the human slaves they bred for specifically that purpose, and no one gave a fuck about that if it meant the rest of the population was left alone.

Now Vorador is the last vampire left, and as Kain watches from the ranks of the spectators, he loses his head in a guillotine and thus all of Nosgoth is cleansed of their stench. All on Nosgoth? No, a single vampire still stands, his name is Kain, and he is ready to chop off some heads himself.

Fortunately, Moebuis proves to be no problem. He summons figures from Nosgoth’s past, present and future to fight Kain and the only one that offers any challenge at all is Kain himself, summoned, according to Moebius, from some indistinct future and apparently hell-bent on offing his younger self. However, after his defeat, Moebuis proclaims that there is no Kain in the future, so we have to assume that Moebius is full of shit.

Moebius: “The future says you die, fucker!”  
Kain: “I already am dead. So are you.” And then he chops off his head. And there was much rejoicing.

Alas, thus all the circle is cleansed. Except for the two that are still left. Still, Mortanius calls Kain to the pillars already, and when Kain arrives he hides behind one of those pillars to watch a confrontation between those last two, as Anacrote accuses Mortanius of having been the one to murder Ariel and Mortanius is all

“I did, and now I murder you. My name is Mortanuis, come on.”

And then he does, and is now the final boss. Except he dies really quickly and then it turns out that the real final boss is that demon thing that possessed him and made him murder Ariel to corrupt the circle and that Mortanius revived Kain to fuck up the demon things plan’s and now the demon thing is the REAL final boss.

He’s a bit more sturdy but he too falls before Kain’s might, and then it’s finally over.

But is it?

Yes, it is.

But is it really?

No, actually, because there is one more pillar guardian to fall before Kain’s might, and that guardian is Kain, successor to the pillar of Balance and the last corrupted member of the circle. Which explains a lot about Kain’s personality defects, but it also would have been something convenient to know eight murders ago.

So. Ariel now projects herself back onto the Pillar platform and presents Kain with a choice. She says,

“You can keep on living your corrupted, terrible, worthless vampiric life and use your powers to become bloody overlord of Nosgoth, but that would spell the pillars’ ruin and thus kill the land and all that is good and holy. Alternatively, you can kill yourself, purify the circle, allow for new guardians to be born, rid the land of vampires for good and fade from history, unsung but the most heroic of all.”

She says,

“I really, really hope you pick option B, because if you refuse the sacrifice, I will be bound to the pillars as a half-faced ghost for the rest of eternity and that would suck for me.”

She finally says,

“I know you are a bit of a self-serving asshole, but I also know when the world depends on you, you will make the right choice and save everyone over yourself.”

And Kain is like,

“Bitch, you thought.”

And then he doesn’t kill himself and the pillars collapse and he makes himself a throne on their ruins and sits on it and drinks blood from a goblet while around him the world ends in fire and blood and Ariel is really pissed. The end.

  
  


…for now.


End file.
